Linking Up Singapore's Media Industry

IAB has cookie concerns

The president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has invited Mozilla and other browser companies to work with the trade body to resolve an ongoing dispute about the use of third-party cookies. In a lengthy blogpost, Randall Rothenburg criticised Mozilla’s decision to block by default third-party cookies, which enable advertisers to track online users’ visits to the websites on which they advertise.

“Were they to be embargoed tomorrow, billions of dollars in internet advertising and hundreds of thousands of jobs dependent on it would disappear,” Rothenburg argued. He said that while Mozilla’s views were seemingly benign, they ran counter to history. “The entire marketing-media ecosystem has subsisted on purchase-behaviour data and other forms of research being available without individuals’ consent,” he said, from census data to automotive ownership data. Rothenburg added that while Mozilla claimed to be defending openness and diversity on the internet, its actions would have the opposite effect as third-party cookies were the technology that made small publishers economically viable. “Their elimination will concentrate ad revenues in a shrinking group of giant media and technology companies,” he declared.

The rate of deletion was higher for ad-server cookies (average nine times per month) than for website cookies
(five times per month). Further cookie-related problems included the same person using multiple devices and different people using the same computer.